planechase tagged posts

The final Planechase 2 deck personally offends me. As someone who has been playing white-green aura decks for the better part of the last 15 years, I have no idea how Wizards thought they could make a white and green aura deck and not include Armadillo Cloak in it! Is it because it doesn’t actually have lifelink? Is that why Wizards? Why don’t you just keep rubbing salt in my wounds!

Savage Auras is a deck that will teach people just how terrible many auras are. With elements of Voltron decks, Savage Auras looks fine on paper but after playing a few games with it, I quickly realized it doesn’t work. Totem Armor helps and Rancor is always awesome, but most of the time you’re still just hoping people won’t immediately exile your cards.

Like the other Planechase 2 decks, Savage Auras includes 8 new planes, 2 phenomena and six brand new cards (five of which are exclusive to this deck).

The third Planechase 2 set doesn’t really go for subtlety. Like many red-green decks, Primordial Hunger really has a single goal: make the biggest creatures and then smash people repeatedly with them until they die. That’s about it.

Using tokens and smaller creatures as fodder for dragons and other devouring beasts, you don’t want to get attached to any creatures in your deck (or on your battlefield) because a bigger one will probably eat them in a turn or two.

Like the other sets, six new cards are included in Primordial Hunger. But unlike the others, some of these cards don’t really make sense to me as a Planechase multiplayer release. They’re good cards, but kind of boring. But I guess this means we aren’t going back to devour as a mechanic any time soon.

I think my favorite part about Planechase 2 is that Wizards used it as a fantastic opportunity to revisit older mechanics and breathe new life into them in ways that just wouldn’t work for a regular release. Ninjutsu is a great mechanic but is very limited by the fact that it can only appears on ninja cards (much like how bushido is only on samurai – even though Chub Toad has it!). Given how poorly received Kamigawa was as a whole, it isn’t a plane I see us going back to any time son.

Night of the Ninja is a blue-black deck that makes the most of unblockable creatures and turning them into ninjas over and over again, while constantly triggering entering and leaving the battlefield abilities. Much like Chaos Reigns, Night of the Ninja contains six new cards (though one of them is in each deck). The actual packaging and set are more of the same as Chaos Reigns, though the deck boxes are a nice touch. Except for the part where a sleeved deck won’t fit in them.

With Planechase 2 finally released, it’s exciting to look at the new cards offered in deck deck – along with the new Planes and Phenomena! What I find most interesting about Planechase is I don’t know a single playgroup that actually plays it the way it was designed with individual 10 card planar decks. Every group I’ve played in has ended up using some variation of the Eternities Map. I guess you would call that the universal planar singularity.

The “Chaos Reigns” deck puts the power of cascade in your hands—cast a spell, then cast another spell for free! Wield all five colors of mana and watch your opponents scramble to deal with every flavor of aggression.

Chaos Reigns is the first deck in this series of reviews for one simple reason: it’s first alphabetically! A five color monstrosity, this deck makes the most of cascading spells. In the 60-card deck, there are only six brand new cards: one mythic, two rares, two uncommons and a common.

A quite note about the packaging, I really like how Wizards has amped up their packaging offers of late. The oddly shaped hexagonal box is great looking and the large window really shows off the plane well, but the inclusion of showing the legendary creature on a bend just makes me grimace. I know the card isn’t actually bent, but it just looks wrong! Inside the packaging is the planar deck, the actual deck, a planar die, a deck box, a strategy insert and learn to play guide.

Wizards seems to have finally realized that Planechase was a hit – so they are bringing it back for an encore! But with two much needed twists.

First, there aren’t just planes anymore – there are also phenomena! These are one shot effects that seem to mess with everyone. For example, check out Time Distortion!

Taking a page out of the hugely successful Commander line, these decks will also include ALL NEW CARDS! Looking for an obscene red-blue-green Commander? Check out Maelstorm Wanderer (currently in the running for the best reminder text of all time):

There are a total of 21 new Magic cards in the set, spread across the four decks. Each deck has six of the cards (counting by name), although some appear in multiples.

Planechase (2012 Edition) comes out on June 1, 2012. Each of the four decks contains a sixty-cardMagic deck, a ten-card planar deck, and a planar die. The MSRP for each deck is $19.99. This release will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.